Grace Potter

Grace Potter has a new album, "Mother Road," inspired by her cross-country drives during Covid. From Waitsfield to Topanga, we cover it all!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Sets podcast.
My guest today is Grace Potter, who has a new
album entitled Mother Road. Grace. One of the lyrics on
the album mentions In and Out Burger. Are you a
fan of In and Out Burger?

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Yeah? Ever since I saw The Big Lebowski and there's
no In and Out Burgers in Vermont. So I saw
the movie and was like, my American dream was to
go to find it In and Out Burger at some
point in my life, and I did.

Speaker 1 (00:43):
So does it live up to the legend?

Speaker 2 (00:46):
It does, especially when you breastfeed somebody in an In
and Out Burger, which did happen.

Speaker 1 (00:51):
What happened there?

Speaker 2 (00:53):
I had been drinking and I was out with some
friends I had been I was also a nursing new
mother who was given a night out on the town
with the girls, and I had way too much alcohol
to go home, and just like pump and there was
a guy there who was like, I'll drink the milk.

(01:14):
So I was like, awesome. So I got a dude
drunk off of my booby milk at an In and
Out Burger at two in the morning in Hollywood. That's
a real story.

Speaker 1 (01:24):
That's quite a story. So when you go to in
and Out, what do you order?

Speaker 2 (01:30):
So I don't. I'm I don't do what everybody does.
I like. I have a very specific thing. I like
the I like a cheeseburger, but I don't if it's
American cheese, I don't want it. So I was. I
usually just say I want a cheeseburger, like just clean, simple,
no toppings, like no ketchup, no mustard, no mayo, no,
none of that. Just like I want to know on

(01:51):
a fundamental level what the burger and the bread feel
about each other. That's the best way I feel I
can deduce whether it's worth going deeper in on an
ex laoratory level. And it was. So I just did
a plane burger. But because they were doing they had
cheddar as an option. I did it with cheddar, which
was just delicious.

Speaker 1 (02:10):
Okay, the big thing in and Out is double double.
I didn't know that, But you didn't do that.

Speaker 2 (02:17):
I didn't, I was. I was really just looking for
and this is I'm talking about first order. Ever that
that was way after the breastfeeding incident. Was was much later.
But what I did the first time I got there
was just the plain plain Jane with cheddar cheese. And
then later, uh yeah, I tried the fries. I tried

(02:38):
the I did do this thing they say, if you
take a bite of the what's the one that has
the like the relish and the animal style? Animal style?
Thank you? So you do the animal style with a
doctor pepper and a fry, and there's like this flavor
that it creates in your mouth that apparently is very
similar to like butterscotch. It gives you like a weird

(03:00):
you know after it's like a flavored you know, somalie
a type thing. Anyways, I tried that. It did not
taste like butter scotch in my mouth, but it was delicious.

Speaker 1 (03:10):
And if I snapped my fingers and you could have
any burger, what would that burger be?

Speaker 2 (03:15):
Whoppers? Yeah, after all that, it's just because I grew
up in a place where there was no fast food,
so the closest one was a Burger King, and it
was I mean, it's still an hour and a half
drive to the Burger King. But it's sad to me
to think that that's the reality of my life. But
fast food is really rare for me. It's just something

(03:37):
that comes. It comes with the territory. If I guess
touring all the time, but it doesn't change the fact
that I like meat grown on a farm and fed
to me by the person who slaughtered the cow. So
it's a little different where I come from and Vermont.

Speaker 1 (03:55):
Okay, you're from Waitsfield.

Speaker 2 (03:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (03:58):
I went to college in Middlebury over the Hill No way.
Oh yeah, my college roommate lives in Waitsfield.

Speaker 2 (04:06):
Ah.

Speaker 1 (04:06):
Do you know the Klars?

Speaker 2 (04:09):
I know the name. And when I was I served
at a restaurant and there was a Verklar table that
they would have that they loved. It was like the
quarter table that they always had whenever they came in.
But I don't think I ever served them myself. I
just know of the Verklar table.

Speaker 1 (04:24):
Okay, So were your parents Did they grow up in Waysfield?

Speaker 2 (04:29):
My dad is from Connecticut, my mom is from New Jersey.
They had that baby boomer back to the land moment
in the seventies where they had gone to Saint Lawrence University,
and my dad graduated a little bit before my mom.
But he just didn't want to stop skiing, so he
decided that he wanted to figure out a job, a
career path that would provide him the ability to ski

(04:54):
forever and have a reason. So he became a sign
maker and he does all the signs or for instance,
the American Ski Company, but also many other privately owned
mountains and ski areas. So that's that was his passion.
He followed it, and my mom was an editor, a
photographer and artists. It just lived lived the dream artist,

(05:16):
you know, hippie life here in Vermont and and really
brought a huge amount of the hippie glory that you
would imagine like the hill people in Vermont had they
were living that that exact dream.

Speaker 1 (05:30):
Okay, so are you a skier?

Speaker 2 (05:33):
I was, but I have mixed feelings about skiing now.
I just think it's a really really expensive, silly pastime
and very dangerous. And everybody gets hurt all the time
that I know, And so the more people that I
know that have gotten hurt or just can't play music
because they broke their wrist or whatever, it is, like, Okay,
it's not worth it. So for purposes of like my

(05:55):
greater purpose in the world is music, I'm not gonna
I don't want to be that guy that has to
tell the story about how I crashed skiing and that's
why I can't play guitar anymore. You know, it's not
worth it.

Speaker 1 (06:07):
So one was the last time you got on the hill?

Speaker 2 (06:09):
I was in Jackson, Wyoming after playing Downtown. It was, Yeah,
it was twenty twenty nineteen. No, twenty twenty, it was
twenty twenty. Yeah, well it's not that long ago. It
was because we were in Jackson and I had to
show that I knew what I was talking about because
I was a competitive downhill ski racer and was raised

(06:33):
on that in that culture, and I thought nothing of
it until I went out into the world and saw
that not everybody gets to grow up like that. And
the second that I realized that my passion and my
purpose was something else other than winning, Because the only
reason I really wanted to be a GS skier was
because the grand slalom suits are really tight and they

(06:56):
reminded me of Ziggy star Dust and I'm not even
kidding that. I was like, if I get to dress
like Zaggy start Us and go super fast down a mountain,
then count me in. But beyond that, beyond the fancy
outfits and the going fast, I think I've managed to
figure out a career where I can do both of
those things.

Speaker 1 (07:15):
Anyways, you know, okay, if your father was a sign painter,
it sounds like your mother was freelance. Doesn't sound like
there was a ton of money growing up. What was
the economic status?

Speaker 2 (07:27):
It was a legit problem. We did end up renting
our house out a few winters and that's where I
ended up going to Albuquerque to visit my grandparents and
they lived out there, and we did have to do
the like the cross Country Walk of Shame, you know,
where my parents were limping along financially and needed to go,
you know, move back in with the parents, and we

(07:49):
homeschooled and had a really amazing cultural experience, which at
the time I was too young to understand that there
was financial reasons for that. I thought it was just
because we were going to go on a nice family
road trip, but actually we genuinely needed to, you know,
to step away from the expensive ski culture for a

(08:09):
hot minute there. And I think it was good. It
was character building.

Speaker 1 (08:13):
So how many kids in the family.

Speaker 2 (08:15):
There's three. I'm the middle child. I've got an older
sister and a younger brother.

Speaker 1 (08:19):
And what's the difference in age two.

Speaker 2 (08:21):
Years between us. It's like that perfect.

Speaker 1 (08:24):
I have the exact same situation. I'm the middle child too.

Speaker 2 (08:27):
You are. And you know what, here's another interesting thing.
I happened to have an honorary doctorate of the Arts
from Middlebury Really, doctor Lefsetz, doctor Potter, nice to.

Speaker 1 (08:38):
See, PhD. How did you get How did you get that?

Speaker 2 (08:43):
I think they just wanted me to play the graduation
and they couldn't figure out how to. They'd been doling
out honorary degrees to me. I got one from Champlain College.
I got an honorary doctorate of the Arts at Champlain College,
an honorary graduate's degree at Saint Lawrence, where I had
left to college. But you know, I think I just
put it out there into the world. I manifested it

(09:05):
into happening. I just said like, hey, listen, I'll play
your graduation. Just give me a fake degree. I'll hang
them on the wall, and you got to call me
doctor from now on.

Speaker 1 (09:14):
Okay, So what are your older and younger siblings up to?

Speaker 2 (09:19):
So my sister is a glass blower and is now
this is such a wild story, but in through the
world of glass she became the curator of a Doll
Museum because they needed glass eyeballs to replace these like
Victorian dolls, and she was just helping them source the eyeballs,

(09:42):
I believe. But ultimately, through some pretty wonderful just happenstance,
ended up in Virginia Beach at curating this museum. And
my brother Lee is he has epilepsy and nonverbal learning
disorder and also has gone through the mental health program

(10:03):
here in Vermont in every capacity he's been through the Ringer,
but has found that therapeutic expressive arts like poetry and
drawing has been kind of the main resource in his life.
Just like all of us artists that grew up in Potterville,
we all kind of got fed the potion at an
early age. And it's it's super inspiring to be around

(10:26):
him because the thing that I do that comes so
naturally doesn't come naturally necessarily to him, but it heals
him from the inside in such an amazing way. And
I'm happy because I'm home and I get to actually
see it because it's been kind of at a distance
for the last ten years. So we have our Hemingway
and Fitzgerald moments on the porch where we smoke cigarettes

(10:47):
and he reads me poetry, and it's been a new
realm of connection with me and him. But my sister
and I were always thick as thieves, you know, getting
into all kinds of trouble in the early days.

Speaker 1 (11:00):
So your brother lives with your parents.

Speaker 2 (11:04):
Right now, he's living at home. Uh, he also has
a community based care program. So we actually just finished
along delving into what the future holds for him, because ultimately,
I think it's gonna it's gonna land on me and
my sister in a in a very real way pretty soon,
because it's just, you know, it's really challenging to have

(11:24):
the mental health world and try to work with it
and also have a crazy family like ours. Like we
change our minds all the time. We're very spontaneous, lightning
bolt type people. But when you're working with community based
care where these people need to like know where the
person is at all times and or have a driver
for him or take him to work, we are like, yeah,

(11:46):
but there's a bonfire over in the field and we're
gonna go jam. You should totally calmly and like, you know,
it just it's impossible. We are impossible. We are very
difficult people to work with.

Speaker 1 (11:58):
Okay, if you're you're the middle child who's yea tends
to be overlooked. The hopes and dreams were in the
first one. They feel a little pressure, more than a little,
and there's all this attention on your brother. Where does
that leave you? Growing up?

Speaker 2 (12:14):
I was. You know, it's interesting where I grew up.
Everybody calls me Trudy, and people who don't know me
I don't understand, or who think they know me don't
get that. But apparently for the first four years of
my life, I was almost completely mute, and I just
sat and sucked my thumb and sort of watched the world,
and they called me Gertrude Stein. I guess I apparently

(12:38):
just sat and sort of Whether it was judgmental critical
thinking going on or just flatlining, I'm not exactly sure,
but whatever was happening in my brain developmentally, I think
I felt it was safer to sort of be in
word with myself and just turn inward and hold on
tight to my own self soothing, And yeah, I was

(13:01):
a thumbsucker till I was like twelve. It got weird.

Speaker 1 (13:07):
Okay, you know you're in the mountains, although las you're
growing up, I mean I went. I lived in Vermont
in the dark ages. Not only was there no internet,
there was no cable TV. There were no DVDs. Cable
TV and DVDs came in certainly while you were growing up.
But you were going to regular school, right.

Speaker 2 (13:29):
I did go to regular school. I also, I'm legally blind,
so I did. There was a learning resource program that
Vermont had where it subsidized people with visual impairment and
hearing impairment. So I ended up in that room a
lot at face in elementary school. But I did, you know,
pretty early on feel that pull toward culture. And oddly enough,

(13:56):
in our tiny little town of Waitsfield in nineteen eighty six,
they opened a movie theater at the bottom of my hill.
I mean, what are the chances? And it wasn't just
any movie theater. This guy had this opulent vision. I
think he was sort of a Gordon Gecko mountain man
guy who wanted to bring a little bit of New
York City to Vermont. And he built this place and

(14:20):
he called it Edison Studios. And it looked like an
Art Deco kind of Hollywood bowl looking place, A beautiful right, right,
I fall down the hill and land there so that
was my first job. I also worked at the video store.
If there had been a record store in town, you know,
I would have worked there. But I grew up hoping
that my parents would let me watch TV and movies

(14:43):
a little more than they did. But once it became
my job, it was easier to convince them to let
me be absorbed in that world. A bit.

Speaker 1 (14:52):
Tell me a little bit more about being legally blind.

Speaker 2 (14:56):
So you can kind of see as we get in
on that. I mean, this is not this is not
helpful for listeners at home that can't see what Bob
is looking at here. But I was born leely blind
and it's not degenerative. It's just the way that I see.

(15:16):
And I kind of made a specific choice to not
get corrective surgery. I did try wearing contact lenses for
a while. I also spent a lot of time as
a child taking my glasses off and making up new
names for myself and just hoping that people wouldn't know
it was still me. So I think I played around
with disguise because in my mind, I mean, I saw

(15:40):
something completely different when I took my glasses off, and
the world was kind of bright and sparkly, and unfamiliar,
like there was confetti falling, you know, in the color
of the general objects that I was seeing, but that
it wasn't It didn't matter what it was, as long
as I knew there was something in front of me.
So I've always had really good depth perception, but I

(16:02):
just cannot cannot really sustain any level of focus on anything.
I cannot read far away or close up words. I
could probably tell you the color of somebody's eyes if
they got close enough to me, but I am far
sighted in a way that makes it extremely dangerous for
me to drive without my glasses on.

Speaker 1 (16:23):
But if you're wearing your glasses, how's your vision perfect?

Speaker 2 (16:28):
Yeah, I'm able to see. I mean, the legal blindness
is actually only in the state of Vermont because I
did my vision test in California when I lived out there,
and I passed. Is that not creepy? Super creepy.

Speaker 1 (16:39):
I don't know. I'm going to stay off the highway
when you're there.

Speaker 2 (16:41):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (16:43):
So you mentioned Ziggy Stardust and you mentioned, you know,
skiing one of the outfits. Ziggy Stardust came out in
nineteen seventy two, So how did you get exposed did
your parents play those albums? Had to learn that music.

Speaker 2 (16:57):
My parents have a killer record collection because they had
a production company. Again with the skiing, trying to figure
out how to party in all the ski towns. They
started a company called dream On Productions, where they would
take photographs of the day's events, whether it was a
ski race or hockey or if they did the nineteen
eighty one Olympics and cruises and all kinds of crazy stuff,

(17:19):
and they would photograph everything that happened develop it that day.
My mom would make the soundtrack and splice it all
together and do the edits while my dad was, you know,
manically trying to get this thing done, and they would
put it together into a slideshow and project it onto
the streets around these sporting events, almost like the precursor

(17:40):
to MTV. They would play music along to it and
create kind of a narrative of the day, and they
would pick sort of stars and local faces and characters
that they thought the townsfolk would enjoy and be like, oh,
that's crazy Randy again, all the naked ski guy, you did,
the polar Bear plunge, whatever it was. So they we
created a culture around the bar, you know, the bar

(18:04):
and the party and the after party life. The app
pray Ski and brought this kind of multimedia mixed media
adventure to it. So their record collection, and of course
this is I don't really know whether they were paying.
I don't think they were paying for any of the
song usages. But there was a lot of really great
music that they were applying to these very specific visuals

(18:27):
from an early time. I believe seventy They started that
whole thing in about seventy two, and through from seventy
two to eighty four they were doing dreamount productions. So
the record collection was thick. It was a sturdy and
interestingly organized and categorized record collection. And then of course
the kids were born and we kind of got our

(18:50):
grubby myths on it and changed changed our worlds in
a good way. But I think it changed their record
collection in a pretty bad way.

Speaker 1 (18:57):
So what did you listen to everything?

Speaker 2 (19:00):
I loved albums because the artwork was like a book.
It was similar size to like a kid's book. So
for me, as a blind kid, a big piece of
art in my hand felt amazing. And then there's this
thing inside it that makes music come out that's wild.
So Jethro Tull, the Band I Love Maggie Bell. I

(19:22):
loved the Beatles, but I didn't love them the way
everybody learns about the Beatles. I had a really roundabout
way of discovering them. It was on some weird compilation
that my mom had put together on a tape about
having kids, and it was all the songs that the
Beatles had written about children, but also a bunch of
other people and John Prine and you know, Bruce Coburn

(19:44):
lived in the lived and dated a woman in the
Madver Valley for a brief time. So there was a
lot of that, which I call dad rock. There's a
lot of dad rock, Rod Stewart, Mark Knopfler and Dire Straits,
The Who. Loved Loved the Who because it felt like
it was very modern to me, and it sounded just
like any cool kid rock that I might hear on

(20:05):
the radio. Then I got really into like the Pointer
sisters and Patti LaBelle and Oh the Staples singers. I mean,
that's the record that changed my life. That song on
My Way to Heaven was the first. It was the
first time I heard music where I knew it wasn't
from where I was from and I needed to go
to where that music was being made because it just

(20:28):
cut me open wide and I was never the same again.

Speaker 1 (20:39):
Okay, so you go to larry Town because your parents
went there.

Speaker 2 (20:46):
Yeah. Yeah, I'm a sad tale of the American the
American system gone wrong. I'm one of those legacy kids
that got in because my parents went there, you know,
because I had terrible grades and I didn't get into
any of the colleges I wanted to go to. I
really wanted to go to Wheaton College. I had a
vision of Wesley and didn't even bother for any Vermont

(21:07):
schools because I wanted to get out of town. I
did want to get out into the world. Randice. I
tried the Vanah School of Art and Design. I applied
to like thirteen schools, and the fact that I got
into Saint Lawrence is a bit It's not too mythical, actually,
it's just it's just, you know, the appropriation of my parents'

(21:32):
you know, amazing illustrious careers and lives there. Not to
say that they were giving a huge amount of money,
but I think they had big personalities and they were
remembered and loved and appreciated up up on campus, and
they had a great love story. My uncles and aunts
all went there, my cousins had gone there, So it
felt like the natural course of the salmon going back upstream.

Speaker 1 (21:55):
You know, Okay, let's go back at chapter. You're listening
to all this music. At what point do you start
to play and sing?

Speaker 2 (22:06):
I must have been four. I mean, I've got pictures
of me at four, tinkering around on the piano with
this look on my face like I am, I'm gonna
master this thing. I don't remember when I started singing.
I was just always singing. It was always in me.
And it wasn't just that I was singing. I was harmonizing,

(22:26):
like right away to music that felt close to my heart.
It felt like I remembered it from being in my
mom's belly almost. You know, there's like a familiarity with
music that never made me feel shy. I was never shy.
And then, of course, going through adolescence, I remember, like
the notebook, the first notebook full of songs, so probably eleven, twelve, thirteen,

(22:49):
somewhere in there where all those big feelings go, they
go into the notebook, and a lot of those notes
were actually songs. So it must have been really early
on that I was writing do You Take Piano Lessons?
My mom, among the many, the Jacqueline of all trades
that she is, was also a piano teacher. And so

(23:10):
I would get off the school of bus, and so
would eleven other kids, and we'd all walk up the
mile long driveway to our house on the hill, past
the Crazy Movie Theater and Alan Lumber and the Valley rental,
and everybody would eat my snacks, eat me out of
house and home they would. But I would listen to
the kids taking lessons and my mom patiently teaching them

(23:34):
how to read music and try for these more complicated pieces.
She was always encouraging people to try something a little
bit more complicated than what they think they can handle.
And then at the end of the day, I'd be like,
all right, I want to learn that song. So whatever
the song was that hit me the most, that felt
the most intriguing, But I never learned how to read music.

(23:55):
She just would sit with me and I'd watch her
fingers and I'd listen, and she just had an elegance
to her and the way that she played that I
never quite could conjure. I had to sort of create
my own style. So by ear, I would block out
the chords and try and recreate them as best I could.

Speaker 1 (24:15):
Okay, let's jump all the way forward. Right now, you're
in Waitesfield.

Speaker 2 (24:20):
I'm in Faston, which is the very school that I
went to elementary school. Yeah, there's no zip.

Speaker 1 (24:24):
Code right face, which was Glenn Allen now sugar Burst.

Speaker 2 (24:28):
North, exactly exactly.

Speaker 1 (24:30):
But you lived into Panga for a.

Speaker 2 (24:34):
While, right, yes, and I still do actually, so we
split time. I'm by Coastal. I'm polyamorous with my hometown.
I really can't let go of California. I just I
have this. It's what Mother Road is really about. I mean,
if we're really going to jump forward, that's what the
whole album is about, is this feeling of like, wait

(24:55):
a second, I'm really going to go home now, Like
after all this hard work, going to go home. That's
not it. That wasn't the plan. Not now anyways, And
to Panga is a place. I mean, it's where I
gave birth to my son, you know, I had him
at home in the bathtub and really set up a

(25:15):
life that I believed was my anchor point. It was
going to be the roots I planted for myself in
the same way that my parents were like, sorry Connecticut,
Sorry New Jersey, sorry parents, sorry American dream, We're going
to go back to the land and build our life.
I was. I was sort of in the midst of
that process when COVID hit, and I think fear crept in,

(25:37):
you know, and I've really was worried about my parents
and my brother. I wanted to be where the people
were that I loved the most, and I wanted to
just see them and hold them and know that, like
it wasn't a robot on the computer screen pretending to
be my mom and dad. I had to touch them
in the flesh. And you know, I'm sure we all
remember that that was a complicated thing to do in

(25:58):
the midst of lock down and post lockdown, the uh
you know, the two weeks of sitting alone wherever you
traveled and just you know, uh, the quarantining and went
through all of that, and it just felt like the
process of revisiting and being a part of my parents'
life and my childhood. It definitely triggered something very big

(26:21):
in me on a on a songwriting level, but also
on a personal level. It was just a something akin
to a slow car crash.

Speaker 1 (26:34):
Yeah, a slow car crash, and what were.

Speaker 2 (26:39):
Crashing back into reality after living my like Joni Mitchell,
End of the Rainbow life out in California, which is
exactly where I pictured myself being for at least another
ten years. I was really just getting into my groove
of balancing motherhood and work and the flow of life
out there. Is there's an ease of my I'm not

(27:03):
sure what it is. It's just my demeanor. I've always
wanted to go somewhere where there's a city nearby and
an ocean nearby, but I always wanted to be sort
of causeted by the mountains and to Panga is that
I mean to Panga Canyon. I cannot over express just
exactly how much it is like the mad River Valley
where I grew up, with the exception of the ocean,

(27:26):
which is beautiful, you know, and I think being in
that world and experiencing that blissed out feeling that I got,
which I think you can hear on the album Daylight,
this feeling of just like this is my happily ever
after this is the end of the Rainbow, we're here.
I really did feel like there was like a rip

(27:47):
in my reality and a transition and a transformation in
my brain that forced me to get real and be
honest with myself and with my family, with the love
of my life and the kid that we made together,
and come to see why. There were things about coming

(28:08):
back to Vermont that just made a whole lot of sense.
But once I got here, it was it was a hard,
hard winter. It was a really uncomfortable thing for me
to come back here, and it was pulling up all
these old feelings where when I was visiting it was
just like, oh my god, just crazy blowing through town
and wow, my life is just on this rock and

(28:28):
roller coaster and here we go again. I love you all,
I'll see you later. And it was always on my terms,
you know, but coming back this time was a not
on my terms. It was, you know, based around this
circumstance of COVID. It was also based out of fear,
which I never liked. I don't like doing anything out
of fear. But I also felt like logic was starting

(28:52):
to take over, and I don't like logic. I'm not spuck,
I'm Kirk, you know. So it was hard for me
to wrap my head around the reality of being home.
But it was also amazing to reconnect and remember the
life that I had here before before all of the madness.

Speaker 1 (29:13):
You know, Okay, if COVID hadn't happened, would you have
gone back to Waydesfield eventually?

Speaker 2 (29:19):
Yes, I don't think we would have bought the farm
that we're in. I don't think that it would have
happened as soon. I always planned on coming back when
when my parents needed me, you know, and really being
there for them and being able to provide for them
and have the extremities of my life being tour buses

(29:40):
and crazy all nighters and TV in the morning and
flying from Japan and you know, borrowing borrowing Bob Weir's
plane to go fly from one place, you know, like
all these stories that you hear that are like the
crazy rock star life. I absolutely had that, and I
knew that that didn't That was not a sustainable way
to live. But I wanted to ease out of it.

(30:02):
And this was not easing out of it. This was
the opposite of that. And in buying a property and
making that sort of staking that claim, it definitely sealed
my fate in a way that I think I was
not at peace with and that's why I went on
all those road trips looking for where I really belong.

Speaker 1 (30:24):
Okay, before we get to the road trips. So you
own property into paying and your own property.

Speaker 2 (30:29):
In Wadesfield, that's right, yep.

Speaker 1 (30:31):
And how do you decide where you are and when
you are? Oh?

Speaker 2 (30:35):
God, such a good question, Bob. I don't know. You know,
there's a lot of it that has to do with
school and the kiddo, but it's also about what serves
the moment. And I'm also a bit of a migratory
beast myself. I'm really I think certain people really are
in that vagabond lifestyle, which chase the weather where it goes.

(30:58):
And so in the winter time we tend to go
back to California. So we've been up until recently and
this year being the exception because I'm going to be
on tour. We've been doing primary pieces of winter in California,
coming back in the spring and spending spring, summer and
fall in Vermont. Where's your husband from Palo Alto California?

Speaker 1 (31:23):
So how does he like living in Vermont?

Speaker 2 (31:25):
He loves it. It's so annoying, He's like, so, I mean,
he comes out. He wakes up at six in the
morning with those rosy cheeks having just been on like
a snowshoe, you know, and he's got his snow pants on,
and he doesn't mind having staticky hairs sticking up everywhere.
But like, the winter is a place. I think it's

(31:46):
like a wonderland for him. He's like a five year old,
you know, out in the snow, like catching snowflakes on
his tongue. I'm not actually kidding that that happened many
a time this last winter and watching him in joy
Vermont has also been one of those processes of falling
back in love with Vermont through the eyes of the

(32:06):
person that I love. And he's definitely been my cheerleader
and the biggest believer in in this process of moving
back and forth and bouncing back and forth between the
two places.

Speaker 1 (32:18):
Okay, so you have fires into Panga and you have
floods in wade Field.

Speaker 2 (32:24):
I was just thinking about this. I think we can apply.
I think we are we can apply for FEMA in
both places, and I'm yeah, that's that's the scariest reality check.
I'm not going to because luckily both of our properties
have not been affected but we are actually qualified to
apply for FEMA in both places. And that's that's the

(32:45):
terrifying reality of where we are now. And I also
think that the move to Vermont was based a bit
on that, because we underwent a pretty traumatic fire, the
Woolsey Fire a few years back, where a huge amount
of our friend's houses were one day there were there,
next day they were just gone. And some of some
of those friends actually lived with us through some of that.

(33:06):
So we evacuated to Panga with a group of people
and all of their dogs and goats and snakes and wolves,
because that's so to Panga.

Speaker 1 (33:19):
Okay, Vermont is different now. You grew up, and maybe
during this transition you experienced it. But not only is
there internet everywhere, a cable television everywhere, there's fat acts everywhere.
On some level, you can live anywhere today. So how's
it different from when you grew up?

Speaker 2 (33:38):
I'm noticing now that there is a culture and a
brand to Vermont that probably existed all along, but that
for me I wasn't aware of because I was in
the service industry, so I was I was on the
serving side of the table, you know, as a waitress,
as a house painter and a contractor and as somebody

(33:58):
who kind of saw my life moving in that direction.
If I hadn't become a musician, I could have I
could have done any number of odd jobs and been
a jacqueline of all trades myself. But I see it
differently now because I'm in a different I'm in a
different financial state than I was. I am now kind

(34:19):
of one of those hoity toity people that I used
to make fun of when I was a waitress, you know.
And that might be the weirdest offset for me about
coming back to Vermont is that there's a perception of
who I am, and I am a real Vermonter, and
I'm native and born and raised and you know, grew

(34:40):
up in the mud, you know, bail and hay at
a dairy farm and try in every every single corner
of the world. And having traveled to every single corner
of the world, I can tell you that that that
idyllic life that I had is still totally happening here.
I mean, there are really kids, my son age still

(35:01):
doing exactly that. And it does feel like that foothold
isn't going to go away anytime soon, because it's something
that is treasured. It's a lifestyle, and it's a an
ethos of hard work and humility and being aware of
your surroundings and being conscious of what you're bringing into

(35:22):
the world and feeling your way through your purpose with
a very practical outlook on life. And that to me
is fundamentally still a real thing. But who I am
in that setting is very different. And I mean something
as simple as the fact that I still have my
LA phone number and when I call places, they won't

(35:46):
pick up unless it's an eight to two number. So
I'm like the stranger, danger rich lady with an LA
phone number calling in asking about concrete molds and can
I get you know, this tint for my concrete floor
polish for my barn that we're refurbishing. You know, it
just sounds like I want to punch me in the face.

Speaker 1 (36:07):
You know.

Speaker 2 (36:07):
That's the me that has a bit of the old
you know, just hard work in salt of the earth
girl that just doesn't want to hear it from some
pony lady. But now I am the pony lady.

Speaker 1 (36:19):
Okay, So how has it worked out financially? Because one
might say you're rich now, I mean everything's relative today.
You have billionaires, you have people who are homeless. So
the music business has changed. It used to be more
of a threshold either you made or you didn't make it. Yeah,

(36:39):
so how's it working for you?

Speaker 2 (36:42):
It worked out because, and for me, what I think
of as worked out is I don't have to I'm
not going paycheck to paycheck anymore. And I was able to.
I'm able to own, you know, a house. I bought
a house before I was married to Eric. I was
able to buy a house. And for myself, I'll fund
the prospects of my dreams and the things that I wanted.

(37:04):
I was able to sort of nurture into being, maybe
not by having an endless well of money available to me,
but more by the trust and the I think the
constitution of who I was becoming, and the potential within
my musical career and the hard work that I had shown,

(37:25):
and the enduring kind of like I'm not going anywhere people.
I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm not going anywhere.
That feeling was a pretty leveling force for me financially.
I also have a great business manager who's always made
sure that that I'm not overdrafting, overdrawing, overdrafting. That's the
way it could be both either way. I don't do

(37:46):
that anymore. I used to do it all the time,
and paycheck to paycheck has has moved into a place
of much more security. But it was, you know, it
was stretching it very thin to buy this farm and
to make it all come together. It's one hundred and
twenty acre farm, and that's a lot of land. And
there's a lot of other costs that you have to
consider when you're buying a farm, one of which is

(38:09):
also just the social responsibility of it. You know, do
you want to be a gentleman farmer general lady farmer
and have nothing happened here? Or do we want to
have an ecosystem that we're reintroducing with dairy cows or
goats or you know, hops or weed or whatever it
could be. And every single one of those endeavors comes
with a cost, and so there's a reality check to it.

(38:33):
But then there's a paycheck when I play my gigs,
and so I think I've subsidized as best I could
the passion projects that I've had with the reality that
I think music really is if I put the work
in and if I pound in the pavement, and I'm
out there on tour in a sustainable way with keeping

(38:54):
my overheads as low as I can, I can do
pretty well every year, you know, so.

Speaker 1 (38:59):
Tell me about these drives cross country.

Speaker 2 (39:02):
So again, everything that a Vermantra does has to be practical,
and the practicality of me starting this whole endeavor was
that during COVID you couldn't rent a car. I mean,
I'm not sure if you experienced that, but for anybody
who was trying to rent a vehicle at a certain
point in the summer of I think twenty twenty one,
you could like make a reservation and pay a bunch

(39:25):
of money for that reservation, and then you'd get to
the front counter and they'd just be like, yeah, yeah,
I know, thanks for your money, but we're out of cars.
Don't know what to tell you. So after that happened
literally four times in a row, I started to kind
of panic because I do feel like I need a
fire escape for my life and for the feelings of

(39:49):
being trapped and the feelings of sort of strangulation, including
the financial stuff. Was starting to come into a place
of like, I don't want to have to pay for
a rental car. We have a perfectly good, brand new
car that we bought at twenty twenty Volkswagen Atlas, sitting
there in California, just waiting, just toasting in the sun.

(40:10):
So I got on a plane and masked up and
you know, armed myself with some notepads and went out
and picked up the car and drove it back. That
was the first trip.

Speaker 1 (40:29):
Okay, A couple of questions, Yes, have you gotten COVID,
and if so, how many times?

Speaker 2 (40:35):
Yes? I have two times, And the first one was
like a yep, this is definitely one million, one hundred
thousand percent COVID. Oh my god, that that, Oh my god,
sandbag in the head COVID. And I was in Texas
playing a private gig, which was a bummer because my
kid was with me. I had him. I just happened
to be like, let's do a mother's son adventure because

(40:57):
I was excited to drive with him and take him
on a little mother road trip. Oh boy, did it
go a whole ski whiffy, whole kind of ski whiffy.
And then the second time, I actually didn't know that
I had it, except that when I patted my head,
my scalp hurt in the exact same way that I
remembered it hurting when I had COVID the first time.

(41:17):
That like pain to the touch, almost like you can't
bear to have the weight of your hair touching your
head kind of feeling.

Speaker 1 (41:24):
And any long term effects.

Speaker 2 (41:27):
I'm so lucky to say that I have not had
any long term effects. I know so many people who
have and it's just devastating. So for me, I think
the fear was that my voice or my hearing, because
a lot of people, I think the hearing was one
of the big scary things that happened to two of

(41:47):
my musician friends who just can't actually function as musicians
the way that they did before because they've lost their hearing.

Speaker 1 (41:55):
How old is your son.

Speaker 2 (41:56):
He's five and a half going on six in January,
and he was actually here helping me sound check. He
put the microphone right here for me today. So he's
taking after his papa and getting into getting into sound engineering.

Speaker 1 (42:13):
Okay, so you fly out to California to get the car.
Who's taking care of your son?

Speaker 2 (42:21):
That would be my husband, Eric Valentine, that fine young
man himself.

Speaker 1 (42:26):
So he's good alone with the kid.

Speaker 2 (42:28):
Oh yeah, I mean that was the agreement from the
beginning when we had Sagan, it was you're going to
be mister mom. He declared to the world he was
going to retire from record producing, which I knew wasn't true.
I mean, everybody knew wasn't true, but at least I
hoped it wasn't true. But he really he's lived a
life of not needing to prove himself. I think because

(42:51):
he had such success at such a young age, I
think he really was ready to pump the brakes and
just be at home and be the dad that was
always there for his kid. And I think it really
does show through and shine through in Sagan and his personality,
because you know, we have a different dynamic than a
lot of families and homes American or otherwise. Yet that

(43:14):
I am out there on the road continuing my work
and finding ways through that battle between the sort of
mom shame and missing my family, but also knowing that
there is something worth chasing there that actually will It
is not an impermeable membrane of inspiration. It is something

(43:37):
that is ready to be harvested, and then I can
bring that harvest back to my family and be a
happier person for it.

Speaker 1 (43:43):
So how'd you meet Eric?

Speaker 2 (43:45):
We were making a record together. I was my record
company back in the day when I was at Hollywood Records.
Disney Music Group had been trying to get me collaborating
with this producer forever. But you know, when I heard
about his records and his track record of like Well
smash Mouth and Third Eye Blind and and you know,
Queens of the Stone Age, and I listened to those records.

(44:06):
I loved Queens. I loved Nickel Creek's record that he did.
But I was specifically aware of a type of music
that I knew growing up in Vermont as malrock because
it was only ever played in the malls in the
movies with malls in them, because there are no malls
in Vermont, so there's one. It's a very sad story. Anyways,

(44:32):
there's probably nothing less attractive to me than being told
what producer I should work with, and I hate it.
I really don't like it. So of course I avoided
Eric and meeting with Eric for a long time, but
he just kept coming up over and over again for
ten years. His name would come up, and finally we

(44:52):
met and it was like instant I didn't know it
was love. I actually just was like, what took me
so long? I'm gonna make music babies with this guy forever.
In fact, I use that exact sentence with my bandmates
after meeting with him, I said, music babies forever. This
is a lifer, this guy is. He's just he ticks
all the boxes of nerdiness and caring about audio in

(45:16):
a way that makes it fun for someone like me,
who who kind of I defy anyone to keep me
in a recording studio for any more minutes than I
absolutely have to be there. It makes my skin crawl.
If it's like brain surgery, I have completely changed my
tune because there's this person who is this well spring
of knowledge, and not just knowledge, but the way he

(45:38):
untethers himself from his ego when explaining it and describing
what he's doing. And never in a condescending way did
he ever share an opinion. It was always with this
thread of what can make this better? What are the
opportunities we've missed? This curiosity within him that just felt
like the thing that was missing in my music, you know,

(45:59):
all long, because I feel like that old soul in me,
that precocious songwriter. As a young person coming up in
the music industry, I always kind of had this like
old hat approach of like it's got to be old school,
it's got to be this, it's got to be that.
I know what's best, I know what music is tasteful.

(46:19):
I know what tasteful is. I had made all these
rules and I finally get to be in a studio
with somebody who made it fun to play by the
rules and also even more delicious when you break them.

Speaker 1 (46:34):
So you met them? How long and how did it
become a romance?

Speaker 2 (46:38):
So after the record Midnight was finished, I think a
lot of people experience this when they're in like a
deep intense production schedule with big deadline. Is that it's
like a being in a production of any kind of
film production or summer camp or whatever. There's all that
like days and days and days and weeks and months,
and that ultimately a year making Midnight because the turnals

(47:00):
were sort of coming unglued at the time as well.
The album was finished, mixed, mastered, and I was working
on the album packaging, and I just felt this emptiness
in my heart that was like throbbing, longing drive by
the exit for the studio and just feel my whole

(47:22):
body want to jump out of the car and go
down off the exit ramp. And I didn't understand what
that was for for a few months after the production
of it was done, and it was when I got
I got tapped to do the theme song for Grace
and Frankie. You know that show of course. Yeah, so

(47:43):
that show and its creator had a budget and an
idea for what they wanted to do, and they just
they had figured like, it's Grace Potter's voice. We just
we know it's this song, this Steeler's Wheel song and
Grace Potter, and I was like, this is perfect. Oh
my god, I get to go back to the studio

(48:05):
and lo and behold, the studio wasn't available so yet
again just just like, oh, I don't have a reason
to be there anymore, and I kept finding myself making
up reasons to want to go back into the studio,
and it was obviously to see Eric and just be
around that energy. But ultimately we recorded right down the

(48:27):
road from it, and because I was the producer, I
knew where I wanted to have it mixed. If I
couldn't record it at Barefoot, we recorded at Vox Studios
in Larchmont and then ultimately went back to Barefoot to
mix it and do a few overdubs. So I got
to go back in the studio and that's where it
started to click in for me, and this is yeah,
this is May June twenty fifteen. Realizing like, okay.

Speaker 1 (48:52):
Okay, you had been married before. Two questions. One had
Eric been married before? And two was there any reluctance
to get into another marriage since you'd had a previous marriage? Oh?

Speaker 2 (49:04):
Sure, I mean there was not just reluctance. It was
a it was a nasty overlap, that was a that
was some real deal, like what are we going to
do about these feelings we're having because he'd been with
he was not married to his former partner, but he'd
been with her for for many years as well as
me and Matt. And Matt was you know, in my

(49:25):
band still and was not going to leave or take
a back seat any any day. I mean, even with
the Nocturnals uh dissolving. He was he was really supportive
of my choice to to dissolve the Nocturnals and was
ultimately like, whatever you're doing, I'm sticking on the tour.
You know you're not going to play radio City Music
Hall without me, girl. It was. It was definitely a

(49:49):
really difficult time and a really uncomfortable set of reluctant
people on all sides, and it got kind of interests.
Actually it was pretty scary and violent, like I had
to get a restraining order and don't get into the

(50:10):
details of it. But I'm fine and they're fine. Everybody's fine.
But we weren't fine. It could have been really bad.
It could people could have died. Love love does crazy
things to people, and it was by far the most
dramatic experience of my life, and one in which if
I if I had any minuscule doubt about who and

(50:36):
what was going on and who I loved and what
exactly love felt like, I would have run away and
never looked back. But it was too late. I was
so in love and there was absolutely nothing I could do.
So sharing that feeling with Eric was also really confusing
for him. In fact, I think he said something like,

(50:57):
this is really confusing. You should go and escorted me
out of the studio when I first told him what
I was feeling. And it was because you know, these
these relationships that we were in that had been long unraveling,
where also the thing that defined us. They were the

(51:18):
stories we had been telling ourselves for a very long time.
And it's always extremely uncomfortable to tear yourself out of
one reality and imagine a new reality until it's happening
to you.

Speaker 1 (51:32):
Okay, let's go back to the road trip. So you're
going to go to Topenga to pick up your brand
new Volkswagon.

Speaker 2 (51:38):
Okay, fancy doesn't it.

Speaker 1 (51:40):
You're going to go to the airport. You're going to
pick up the car. What was your plan after you
turned the key and the ignition or push the button?

Speaker 2 (51:49):
I had met a guy on the Santa Monica peer
who runs the kiosk that says Santa Monica Pier end
of the trail Route sixty six. And actually, even though
I'd seen the movie Forrest Gump, I did not actually
register that that's where Forrest Gump was running when he

(52:10):
was doing his like back and forth running road trip.
But it really was that it was this like movie moment,
this aha, because I wasn't sure what I was going
to do, and I love There's a taco place down
there that I love, so I wanted to get one
more taco in California on my way out of town.

Speaker 1 (52:27):
Where do you go for a taco?

Speaker 2 (52:30):
Oh, the taco place in town. It's just a taco truck,
that's right, I like parked on the side of it. I
don't even know what the name of it is. It's
just this guy, Hernando. His name is Hernando. He makes
the best tacos ever. He puts habenaro on everything, and
he puts a pink thing on every taco. But it's
not Pink's tacos. It's a different place. He likes to
do like pickled pink everything. It's fucking perfect anyways. So

(52:53):
I wanted one of those, and I wandered down the
pier just to catch the sunset and be a romantic
fool feeling all that big, confused, welling up feelings of
I don't want to leave California. I don't really know
why I'm driving east now, you know, back to a

(53:15):
place that was creating some conflicting sensations in my soul.
So I was there and that's where I picked up
this guide. It was easy sixty six. It was a
ringbinder book that was done and edited and re edited,
and many many renditions of this book exist out in

(53:36):
the world, but I think his name is Jim McLoughlin,
and he's sort of a proper connoisseur of the road
to flight, the mother roads. So I took that book
with me, and armed with that book, I laid out
a course of action, starting in Panoramic City at the
super racist inappropriately titled and inappropriately branded Wigwa Hotel and Motel.

(54:03):
I just I had to see it for myself to
understand what the hell anyone was thinking. And I kind
of got it. It's like being in It's like being
in the Yogi Bear Jellystone Park cartoon. It's bizarre. But
I stayed there the first night and then just rode

(54:25):
the trail all the way. I highlighted all the pages
of sort of the maybe I'll go here, maybe I'll
go there, lots of little side roots and notes about
like don't go this way. The bridge is washed out,
there is no road there where there used to be
a road. I just so sexy to me. That is
like the beckoning, yes, get me down that road with
the bridge that's broken. I want that, and I did.

(54:47):
I went and found it.

Speaker 1 (54:48):
Okay, So how long did it on that initial trip
how long did it take you to go from California
to Vermont?

Speaker 2 (54:54):
It was only like a week. It wasn't that crazy.
I took my time out. I was obviously kind of
dragging my heels to get east. So it was four
days in Uh, it was to two nights in California,
two nights in Arizona, one night in New Mexico, and

(55:16):
then a straight shot to Saint Louis. So no, yeah,
I'm wrong. Not two nights in California, one night in California,
two nights in Arizona, one night in New Mexico. Uh,
Inducum Carrie, which was one of my favorites.

Speaker 1 (55:29):
To Carrie.

Speaker 2 (55:32):
Yeah, I've driven every kind of rig that's up a
bit anyways, So yeah, Will and Yeah. Those songs though
as well, like Winslow Arizona, you know, I mean, take
it easy, all these songs. There was a trail of
music that goes along with the trail you know itself.
And I thought, instead of trying to write any songs,

(55:53):
I was just gonna listen to not just music, but
like nothing listen to. I did listen to some John
Steinbeck audio books, Travels with Charlie and Grapes of wrath obviously,
but I also I really just needed some quiet too.
And I love the sound of the wind. And one

(56:14):
of the things that that Atlas does it has this
lovely moon roof that opens into this sort of amazing
gauge where you can control how much wind do you
want to hear, how much sunlight you want to have
come in, you can have the shade going with the wind.
Guests just very cool. It's a cool sound. So so yeah,
that road trip was just maybe a little over a week.

Speaker 1 (56:38):
Do you like to drive?

Speaker 2 (56:39):
Oh, I love to drive. I think I was a
trucker in another life for sure, or a race car driver.
I think probably a race car. I did have a bell.
I hung a cow bell off of my rearview mirror
that would ring when I would like you could tell
because the car would start to vibrate in this certain
way when I hit like one hundred and ten mile

(57:00):
an hour and it would be like, okay, bitch, you
better slow down now. So I had my okay, bitch
cow bell go off way too many times, way too
many times.

Speaker 1 (57:10):
So you land back in Vermont, then what's going through
your mind?

Speaker 2 (57:15):
I wanted to write a song about the journey I
wanted to tell a story more than write a song, though,
and I think that's really what started. The more enticing
piece of the album became what's the story, not what
is this album I'm making? It felt kind of high

(57:37):
time to make a record, but not like urgent. It
was sort of like, Okay, I'll get to it. You know,
there's a pandemic on and everybody's gonna have their stupid
pandemic record likes. Let's wait for a few of them
to come out and then I'll do my thing. And
you know, I wrote, Yeah, I wasn't writing songs as
much as I was writing a story about regret and

(58:00):
redemption and trying to wrap my head around the choices
I had made and whether any of it was, whether
I was ever going to be able to square it
all with the person I thought I would be and
the person that I was seeing in the mirror every day.

Speaker 1 (58:15):
You know, tell me a little bit more about that.
The regret and the dichotomy between those.

Speaker 2 (58:20):
Two, well, I think it's mostly to do with the
choices that you don't know you're making, so choices like
being a musician as opposed to being a filmmaker or
a theater mom or a figure skater, or maybe I

(58:41):
should have stuck to downhill skiing, you know, like really
fundamental questions about place and belonging and understanding identity also,
I mean, I think we all kind of got stewed
up into that identity politics conversation and the doom scrolling
of I was in. I was in lockdown with a

(59:01):
couple of gen Z younger younger gen Z people who
had a very specific propensity toward doom scrolling and deeply
political conversations. So I was having a lot of big
thoughts and big more big questions than conclusions than I've

(59:24):
ever had before. I think a proper midlife crisis was underfoot,
and I didn't really know that obviously, but like you know,
a man will go out and buy a top down
sexy car or motorcycle, and for me, it was like,
go get that mom car and open up the moon roof.
That's all I need, you know. But the transformation and

(59:48):
the storytelling that can come with transformation needed to be
outside of my body because my body was also pretty
shut down at that point. I had a miscarriage and
it was really serious. It was it was life threatening
situation where I hadn't miscarried completely, I guess, and it
had continued to grow. And there was sort of a

(01:00:12):
collection of internal bleeding over the course of a really
long and dangerous amount of time that I didn't know
why I was in so much pain, but it was
just getting worse and worse. And so those hormonal things
are going on, and things that I just couldn't quantify
where and how my soul and my purpose and all

(01:00:32):
of these things that were happening that felt like they
were happening to me, sort of that victim feeling that
I had never had before where that was coming from.
So I needed to get out of my own story
and start telling a story, any story, anything, And I
took a visit back to my childhood self, like my

(01:00:52):
bravest version of me at the age of nine, and
decided to start there where I had run away from
home and this is real life now. I ran away
from home when I was nine to my neighbor's house,
Caitlin Welter, and her parents answered the door, and of
course I took off my glasses, you know, and said, Hi,
my name is Lelana Mata Vesquez and I'm from Ecuador.

(01:01:14):
I'm an orphan and the orphanage next door. They're very
mean there. I hate it. Can you please let me
stay with you? And can I please have a pop tart?
And they played along with me? And what was really
interesting about it was I think I lost track of

(01:01:36):
if I was lying, or if I was using my imagination,
if I was creating something like a new life for myself,
or if I was dooming myself to a new life
with a new name and a very sad backstory. But
it didn't matter. It was too late. I had already
made this choice, and it kind of became the seed
pod for understanding my own redemption and my own choices

(01:02:01):
and how much I didn't actually choose. I was lying,
but I wasn't lying. I was nine. I didn't even
know what lying was. I just kind of wanted to
be out of myself and into a story. And that
deep dive at the age of nine led me to
invent this character, Lady Vagabond, who was sort of my

(01:02:24):
superhero chaperone, where I already had a plan where if
anybody asked me why I was alone on the side
of the road, I'd say, oh, I'm not. Lady Vagabond
is making a fire right there in the woods. I'm
just waiting here by the side of the road because
we have a man bringing us water soon, so I'm
going to pick up the water and then bring it
back down to our camp. You know, I had like
I never had to use the excuse, of course, but

(01:02:45):
I had this vision of who I could be as
a strong, independent nine year old kid out on the
road in a bathing suit and Red Sockny's in March.
So long story short, I revisited that story and all
the characters I had sort of created and imagined myself
meeting in some kind of a Nancy Drew novel version

(01:03:08):
of my life. And that's where the songs started coming from.

Speaker 1 (01:03:20):
Okay, so do you work on inspiration? Do you write
the lyrics before the music? Do you say, okay, I
write from ten to one. How do you do it?

Speaker 2 (01:03:32):
Oh? God, I wish I had that. Nick Cave has
that kind of order in his I believe he actually
goes like with a briefcase to a cubicle. I'm so
jealous of that work ethic. I wait and wait and
procrastinate and watch a movie and make a dinner and
paint a wall and then paint a house and then redecorate,

(01:03:54):
and then redecorate again, and then have a baby, and
then do some laundry, and then pick out clothes for
the baby haven't had yet, And then I start writing
the song that's been screaming at me in my ear
the whole time. That's nice, Okay.

Speaker 1 (01:04:08):
So when you ultimately do sit down decide it, is
it as easy process or is it like eking it out?

Speaker 2 (01:04:16):
No, it's easy. It's really easy. In fact, this was
the easiest one yet because I had made a lot
of room and space in my life for writing. And
I can't say I've allowed myself that luxury ever before.
But I mean, we did move to Vermont to build
a barn and create this, you know, fortress of you know,

(01:04:38):
profound creativity. But it wasn't done being built yet. So
we carved out some time while Eric was doing pre
production with Nickel Creek for their record that they put
out this past March, and they were going to be
doing pre production, so I figured I'll do some pre
production too. I'll go down to Nashville, check in with
my songwriter buddies and and and just sit in a room.

(01:04:58):
I'll rent a place with a so my only sort
of caveat in my searching for a house was that
it had to have a piano, and it doesn't matter
if it was tuned. I could get somebody to fix
it up and make it sound good, or tune it myself.
So I sat down and it just fucking fell out,
all of it, and it was fast, like ten days

(01:05:21):
of writing. Some of it was collaborative. I had some
really really wonderful and luscious reconnections with people who I'd
written with, like Hillary Lindsay, who'd had co writing sessions
with a decade or more before, which had never amounted
to any recordings, and so it was amazing to tap

(01:05:43):
back into her her valve and the way she opens
her valve up. But she also had this brilliant idea
to bring in a young young woman, Meg McCree, and
that was really interesting because it sort of spanned you know,
Meg is in her twenties, I'm in my thirties. Hillary
is at her forties, and it felt like it was

(01:06:04):
some kind of a time and dimension hopping space to
be in. So two of the songs that we wrote
together are on Mother Road, Rose Colored Rear View, and
All My Ghosts. But also the mut I didn't need
to co write. I just kind of wanted to. I
wanted to. I had a lot there, like there was
a propensity to overshare and talk and ask questions and

(01:06:28):
listen and hear their ideas and then cross hatch things together.
But I had already kind of formed the vision of
the Memory Castle and Lola, you know, this little girl
from the dust Bowl that I claimed to be and
what her life pans out to be. And that album

(01:06:51):
was already cooking in the furnace of my soul. So
anybody that was writing with me kind of either had
to jump on that bandwagon or just those songs that
we wrote we're going to have to be put to
the side for now. So yeah, I think I had
twenty songs in ten days. It was so fast and
so furious. And then we had eight days in the

(01:07:12):
studio at Dave Cobb's place studio. A.

Speaker 1 (01:07:14):
Okay, well, let's hold for the second. Yeah, you only
made one road trip or you made multiple road trips.
I made four roadwall tell me about the other three.

Speaker 2 (01:07:23):
Yeah, So the retrieval of the car was one. The
adventures that I took beyond that were usually again, it
felt like I needed a purpose, someone to visit, somebody
who's sick. Oh, my friend's having a baby. My friend
lost her baby. You know. I had just had this miscarriage.
So I was doing a lot of outreach to the

(01:07:45):
women in my life that I cared about, but also
to people who I just felt like I had had
not had a chance to connect with in a long time.
So there was two more solo trips across the country,
one all the way back with myself and our trailer
which was empty and was there to be packed up

(01:08:07):
and loaded and moved. So we were gonna move essentially
all of Eric's studio gear to Vermont, as well as
a few of our sort of key pieces of furniture
and all of Sagan's like his baby.

Speaker 1 (01:08:22):
You drove across country with a trailer.

Speaker 2 (01:08:25):
Yes, sir, I am a trucker at heart. Okay, I'm
not scared of shit, man, I am really like I
love I love the road, I love grease and the wheels,
and I love checking on the I mean the tire
pressure turned into a thing, which was interesting because it's
different than a tour bus or even a transport van

(01:08:47):
for example, which as any road warrior knows, you know,
you start in the van and then and every band
names their van Vana White. It's like we thought of
this crazy name that nobody else would ever think of.
Everybody thinks of it. Everybody's van was called Van of White.
I had a Van of White myself. But then you go,
you know, up, and you get maybe a sprinter van,

(01:09:08):
and then you get the Tour of Us. And so
through all that process, I've always been watching and paying
attention to the engine and the tires and the traction
and the brakes and what exactly goes into making a
vehicle operate at its optimum efficiency. And yeah, so I've
always been obsessed with that shit. And I'm not exactly

(01:09:31):
mechanically minded, but I'm also not afraid to like just
try and learn, just get into it.

Speaker 1 (01:09:36):
So, Okay, it's one thing that furniture. It's another thing
to have recording equipment. The stories or legion of people's
trailers being broken into. So when you were driving back
with your trailer full, yeah, how much did you think
about that? And was there any way to prevent theft?

Speaker 2 (01:09:55):
Yes, sir, we were camping on top of the damn trailer.
The trailer is actually called it's called No Boundaries, which
is perfect name for my trailer. And it's a like
half toy hauler, half like hipster climbing mountain person tent vehicle.

(01:10:15):
It's it's not so much like an RV as it
is a little bit of everything. It has a fridge
and a kitchen and a pop out sort of bat
wing wrap around porch type situation, and a ladder that
takes you up to the roof so you can camp.
And then there's this tent that pops up on the
roof so we could just sleep on our stuff, you know.

Speaker 1 (01:10:35):
Okay, just so I know you're talking we, But I
thought these trips were solow. That.

Speaker 2 (01:10:40):
Yeah, So one the trip out there with the trailer,
I was solow, and then the trip back was the
wei with the family. But I also say we for
another reason, which is that I'm not gonna sound very
sane when I tell you that Lady Vagabond was there.
She was she and the little version of me, and

(01:11:04):
like the Alanis Morris Morriset music video, like the you know,
you know, the Alantis Morriset ironic where she's in the
car with herself, that was really going on and not
on a visual level. I wasn't like seeing myself, but
I was talking to my imaginary friends and probably going

(01:11:26):
a little mad. But I was lonely, and I was
working through things that I think no therapist could have contextualized,
as well as my my other people, my higher self,
my lower self, my evil self, my good self, my
little self, you know, my elder sage self. And so

(01:11:49):
it gave me the privacy to have some pretty potent
conversations with the Royal.

Speaker 1 (01:11:55):
We Man and have you been in therapy?

Speaker 2 (01:11:58):
Yes? I have. You know, it's interesting. It started out
during COVID after the miscarriage, because there was a poster
on the wall of the doctor's office I was in,
and it was that thing of like what are you feel?
You know, are you feeling any of these things? And
there was a list of things and every single one
of those things had gone through my head, every single one,

(01:12:19):
and they said free help, you know, come and quire
at the desk. And I just tore that poster off
the wall and I brought it up to the checkout
desk and was like, who, how, what do I do?
What do I call? And which is also a really
difficult thing being Grace Potter in the state of Vermont.
That was also kind of uncomfortable, and it put me
in a vulnerable place of asking for help kind of

(01:12:43):
not publicly, because doctor's offices are a wonderfully private place,
but something really terrifying had happened to me, and I
just was a person. I was just a broken body
needing help, and my mind was trying to catch up
with the things that my body had already decided for me.
So that's really what brought me into the entire process

(01:13:08):
of making this record. And you know, my therapist is
still I talk to her once every two weeks to
this day.

Speaker 1 (01:13:14):
And what about medication.

Speaker 2 (01:13:17):
No medication for me. I can't do that, Unfortunately I have.
I mean, my brother being somebody who's been through that
mental health struggle and has been guinea pigged through medications,
I've seen what I believe are pretty terrifying side effects
to changing the chemistry within us to a degree that

(01:13:40):
felt like if I could go back in time and
stop some of those tests and some of those trials
that my brothers so helpfully helped the rest of the
world figure out were not the thing. I think physiologically,
he'd be a much different person. But also just mentally,
I think it did some real damage. So I've always

(01:14:04):
been extremely sensitive about pills and powders on the road.
And you know, medications are wonderful. Some people really do
benefit from them. But I think the journey for me,
with the exception of some psychedelics every once in a while,
was about trying to be okay, not being okay. You know,

(01:14:25):
I've heard so many people say that now it's kind
of mundane, but there was so much to be worried
about and be afraid of that I think if I
had medicated it away, it wouldn't have made the problem
go way. It would have prolonged the fear. And I'm
not afraid anymore, you know.

Speaker 1 (01:14:46):
Okay, let's go. So you decide to make the album.
You made a number of albums with a group, there's
a group dynamic. Now you're making the album and you're
the act. You have to find the musicians and you're
the boss.

Speaker 2 (01:15:00):
It is different, oh man, It's it's day and night.
It's a really different process. And it started with daylight
and also I mean a little bit in midnight. Although
the Nocturnals were still in that process, they really hated
it and like I said about how making albums was
like brain surgery for me, getting into the studio in

(01:15:22):
general just always felt like pulling teeth with the band
because I think we all had a sense of what
a producer should be doing with us. I think we all,
in our own rights, were producers of our own lives,
and there's sort of I'm leading the way, I'm leading
the charge that that feeling never went away, and especially

(01:15:43):
was magnified and made even more keenly uncomfortable in the
studio because there was somebody at the end of the
day who was dropping their foot down and saying, this
is how it's going to be, which was a lot
of fun with some producers like Mark who just was
just delightful, delicious process of making a record with him

(01:16:04):
and the Nocturnals, because he was such an unabridged, selfless
musician who was really truly not there to dominate anyone
in the same way that I found Eric to be.
But in making these records, uh Daylight and now Mother

(01:16:24):
Road and having the bandwidth to understand that I really
I am somebody who could just kind of call anybody
and ask them to play with me. And there's maybe
a fifty to fifty chance they'll say yes or that
they won't be available, but that I can do that.
I can a people know who I am enough to
take my call, but be that I could like pay

(01:16:46):
somebody to play with me. And it touches on the
way I write songs, because I always wrote songs for
the Nocturnals with them in mind. You know, I write
for the player, just like some people writing a script
for a film will write for a particular actor that
they have in mind for that part. And that changed,

(01:17:10):
and it broke down in the writing of Daylight, and
broke down further in the production and writing of Mother Road.
And it was so fun because I really did just
get to sort of throw the names of all the
people I've ever wanted to work with out on the floor,
just spread them out and go like, okay, what goes together?
And my first instinct was to tap people who I

(01:17:33):
knew probably wouldn't be able to tour with, but that I've
been wanting to play with forever so and people who
I missed, so Matt Musty, my drummer from the Midnight Tour,
also the godfather to my child. I wanted Tim Doe,
the bass player from the Midnight Tour, and he had

(01:17:54):
gone on to play with the Kings of Leon and
is still touring with them to this day. Matt Musty
took a gig with Train, so he's been out with
them consistently. And then Nick Bockrath with Cage the Elephant,
who I had never played with, but he was opening
with Raylan Baxter who's playing with Rayland just on some
time when Cage the Elephant was off and just playing

(01:18:17):
in the band, and I just liked him as a
fucking human being. I was like, that's the vibe, that's
the guy I want. Just I don't even know. I
know I love Cage the Elephant. I know that the
guitar is a prominent presence and that there is a
real craft and some really wonderful voodoo going on in there.

(01:18:37):
Wasn't sure if it was gonna be a definitive yes
or no, but felt like, let's do this, and that's
really it was. It was that simple. But Ben Mont
obviously Ben mont Tench had played on Daylight and is
obviously someone who has always brought me a huge amount
of joy his organ playing is he's the only organ

(01:18:58):
player other than me that I'll let play my records.

Speaker 1 (01:19:01):
Okay, you talked about writing with the the Nocturnals in mind.
Just one stop. Are you a night person since it's
Grace Potter and the Noctournals.

Speaker 2 (01:19:12):
Yeah, And to this day it's a problem because my
annoyingly fresh and wonderfully youthful husband is a super duper
morning person with his getting out and going snowshoeing in
the morning at six. I watched the sunrise today and
I saw an eagle fly over the field. I'm like,
shut up, I'm just like sawing off the sawing off

(01:19:35):
another tree in my dark vampire room. I am very
much a night person. I don't know how much of
that is nature and how much of that is nurture,
but yes, it's.

Speaker 1 (01:19:47):
Sot in a perfect world. What time would you go
to bed? What time would you wake up?

Speaker 2 (01:19:52):
Bedtime is three am? Wake up time as nine am.

Speaker 1 (01:19:56):
Okay, you talked about making the records previously with the
Nocturnals in mind and not having to do that as
a solo artist. To what degree when you make these records,
do you have the audience in mind?

Speaker 2 (01:20:10):
In this case, not a bit, because I wasn't sure
if this was a record, yet same with Daylight, those
two records were private. It wasn't that my Mother Road
was therapeutic. I knew I was going to make a
record called Mother Road, but I didn't know if these
were the songs, because, like I said, I was creating

(01:20:31):
a story that was out of body and yet very
much intrinsic to what my process is with Daylight. I
just I didn't know that Eric was sort of recording
half the time, like I was just going through it,
and I was going through the emotions and the waves
of feelings, you know, making a baby, having a baby,

(01:20:52):
buying a house, building a life, falling in love. All
those things were happening. But it was hard and it
was a danger Like I said, it was some dangerous
times involved, stressful times involved. Last thing I wanted was
for the world to hear that record. To this day,
I'm kind of like, I can't fucking believe I put
that record out. It's just very it's like showing everybody
you're dirty undies. But but Mother Road I really did.

(01:21:15):
It wasn't that I had the audience out of my mind.
It was that I was in a cultivating time in
the studio where I was experimenting, I was like, maybe
I do country. Maybe Oh my god, what if I
chicken fry the whole record? Or you know what if
this is a this is an original motion picture soundtrack
and so then oh but shit, then I would have
to make a movie. Oh fuck, Okay, Well what if

(01:21:37):
I just do both? And that's really what set me
in mind. I was thinking about my audience for the film,
and the film is the album, but the album it's
I call it the original motion picture soundtrack to an
invisible movie.

Speaker 1 (01:21:53):
You talk about, yeah, talk about the miscarriage and being
depressed generally speaking? Are you an optimist? Pessimists? Half full?
Glass empty?

Speaker 2 (01:22:05):
I had always been a glass half full person, like
to a sickening degree where I think my therapist introduced
me to an amazing term toxic positivity. I just thought
that was delicious, and I yeah, up until the miscarriage

(01:22:26):
and just the midlife journey of being someone who's been
out on the road. And I know what jaded sounds like,
and I really hate that, I really do. So I
really needed this record to both be glass half full
but also acknowledge the empty cup I was walking around with,
and that feeling is I think intrinsically part of what

(01:22:50):
drove me to make this sounds at RCA instead of
in my home, which felt way too close. It's like
I got to be a character, imagine myself as Dolly
Parton or Waylon Jennings. In fact, the ghost of Waylen
Jennings is one hundred percent all. He was all up
on my business at the studio. He was he was

(01:23:11):
whisper and lyrics in my ear. I feel like, you
know that, in the same kind kind of cosmic way
that I feel my way through the audience and the
stage experience. This was the first time in the studio
where I really felt like I was conjuring some some
energy and some narratives that were actually beyond myself in

(01:23:33):
an incredibly comforting way. It wasn't spooky, it wasn't scary.
It was just surreal and really it was transformative for
me in the studio and yeah, okay, kind of crass.

Speaker 1 (01:23:49):
The landscape is very different. I'm talking about the business
career landscape that it was in the last century, which
is not when you've had most of any of your career,
and in the twenty first century, there's been an evolution
such that like in the last ten or twelve years,
the old paradigm of your world, dominant, etc. Is not

(01:24:11):
the case. So you finish a record, you're very in
this intense experience in the studio. Now it comes time
people can't see my air quotes to sell the record.
Now to what degree? I'm sure when you make something
you want everybody to hear it, which is a near
impossibility in today's world, irrelevant of what the record is.

(01:24:31):
So the question become let me put it a different way.
There are all these articles about the Taylor Swift tour,
and she and Morganwall one of the biggest acts in
the United States today. If we went and talked to
people and said name to Taylor Swift records, we went
through Waitsfield, many people would not even be able to
do it, never mind seeing them. And that's Taylor Swift.

(01:24:54):
So you have less ubiquity than she has. To what
degree is this challenging? To what degree does this affect
your outlook?

Speaker 2 (01:25:04):
Okay, this is just such a good question. And it's
the thing about me that fundamentally has never changed. I
always think I'm kicking ass, and it's a really specific
feeling of It's not that no one else can. It's
an inclusive, ass kicking sensation that I think is probably

(01:25:27):
based on the dopamine that is created when you're out
on stage and you get this sort of adrenaline and
this flow that is beyond me. I really believe Tina
Turner had it, and I believe that I have it.
Whatever that is, it's a bug. It's something that gets
in you as a cosmic bug that just like crawls
up your ass and never goes away. That it's not

(01:25:49):
wagging the dog. It's not confidence coming from within necessarily,
it's confidence coming through and that I just don't give
a damn how many people are in the audience or
how many reds I sell, and I don't care if
I'm not killing it. I don't like seeing a sad,
empty room. But if the three people in there are elated,

(01:26:10):
that is the same key. That's the golden ticket. That's it.
That's all I've ever wanted. And I think on a
realistic level, obviously, there are things to cultivate within that
thought process. For example, it's good to know that your
ticket sales are either growing or declining, that your record
sales are doing well, or that your streams or this

(01:26:32):
or that I just take that hat and I hand
it to somebody else who's really good at that. Because
the second that I start thinking about it is where
I lose my honesty. It's where I lose my connection
to the purpose that exists inside me, which is specifically

(01:26:53):
to make the music as pure as possible. I can't
be thinking, I can't be watching the hearts and the
likes coming up through the screen. You know. One of
my least favorite things to do is those like live
things where there's a Q and A and I have
to like watch people's comments go by, because they're just
feelings and thoughts. They're just exactly like balloons floating through

(01:27:14):
the air. Or when if you meditate, it's you know,
your thoughts are, you know, unhelpful little leaves on the river,
but if you just sit by the river long enough.
So my creative process is to tap into the river
as much as I can, to know that it's flowing
through me, that it doesn't belong to me, that my
ego is a complete construct, that the stories that I

(01:27:34):
tell myself are both important for the reasons that they
lead to songwriting, but also completely meaningless, and that the
sooner I'm able to break those down, the less attached,
I will get to this white knuckling through life sensation
that I had had for all that time. And so
to answer your question, I wanted world domination and I'm

(01:27:59):
going for it.

Speaker 1 (01:28:01):
And I think I can show.

Speaker 2 (01:28:02):
From the design my record cover that that's what I'm
that's I designed that record cover myself with the very
specific intention that if it's on a shelf and you're
at Walmart, or if you're at a gas station, or
if you're at Target, or if you're I hate that
I haven't listened a single record store yet, but that's
just reality. It is a billboard from the most obnoxious

(01:28:25):
commercial time in the nineteen nineties, when everybody was in
competition with the most shocking, you know images, and I thought, Okay,
I'll just put my cameltoe on my record cover. That
can skip all the apologetic bullshit and get right to
the point so that people really know that they need

(01:28:45):
to be strapped in for this one.

Speaker 1 (01:28:48):
Okay, you know, you have the process, You write, the songs,
you record, and they come out. You got to sell
them to what degree do you ultimately, you know, once
your home off the road, say okay, look at the
record company, look at the grosses, look at the Is
this going in the right or wrong direction?

Speaker 2 (01:29:05):
No? I literally don't check those emails, and sometimes they'll
get through and it's it's been really good news lately,
which is really lovely.

Speaker 1 (01:29:13):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (01:29:14):
It's not that I'm afraid of bad news. I'm not
interested in either news. I really can't. I can't. I'm
very lucky to say that. I know I sound like
laissez faire and maybe potentially ignorant and ungrateful for the
people that work really hard for me, which I'm not.
I am so so not ignorant of what they do.

(01:29:35):
But I cannot. I cannot make space in my in
my head for the worrying, because if I do, this
is what happens. I just want to rip the band
aid off and go pick a new career. If it's
not fun for me, If this feels like the blister
on my heel because I picked cowboy boots instead of

(01:29:58):
beach sandals, then fuck, I'm going to the beach. You know.
I really don't think and I was lucky to fall
into that moment in the music industry where I have
this name that is somehow like there it's not there
like Taylor Swift, and it's not there in the way

(01:30:18):
that it used to be, but it's it's there the
way that the artists that I love were there for
me when I was growing up, And to be a
presence in that way already feels like I've accomplished so much.
You know, after singing Get Me Shelter on stage with
the Rolling Stones, I could have just dropped the mic
and said, bye, I'm going to go make a million

(01:30:40):
babies and live in Switzerland and bury my money and bye,
you know, And there's times where I kind of want to.
But in the meantime, I think it's so fun that
we get to do this for a living, and I
think that it's so hilarious that I'm still getting away
with it and that people are actually willing to be
there help me do it, and you.

Speaker 1 (01:31:01):
Know, okay, for me, let's just say most people have
not seen both sides of the fence. You talk about
singing with the Stones, Yeah, and live is more important
than ever. But talking about recordings, you made a record
with Kenny Chesney, who's a country superstar, you and Tequila
that was a huge hit. Yeah, what was that experience

(01:31:23):
like for you it.

Speaker 2 (01:31:24):
Was awesome, and I think it was. I was blindsided
by what it would do for my career and also
what it would change about my fan base, and how
it propelled me into a limelight that continues to this day.
I mean, I was just on an email about this
about him and today and everywhere I go. It is

(01:31:50):
one of the great gifts that the music cosmos handed me,
in the same way that they handed me Mayvis Staples
in the Fair Godmother that she is to me with
advice and love and respect and joy and inspiration. Kenny
is such a true gift because it really was this

(01:32:12):
like it felt like a joke when I got the
phone call and was invited to sing on that song.
It's turned into the catalyst for a lot of the
other successes I've had, and the reason why probably a
lot of the things I can do to this day
are so so possible. But yet I think the hunger

(01:32:36):
that I see in him, and the work ethic and
the drive and the Nashville approach to things that machine
terrifies me. I think it's something that I wouldn't want
in my life. I can't believe the strength that is
required to maintain that agenda and those expectations, and so

(01:33:00):
in a way, I think when I when you mentioned Taylor,
you know, touring with Tim McGraw and meeting Faith Hill
and her amazing daughters, and the families that come along
for this ride, Derek and Susan, you know, Warren Haynes,
and these characters that have come into my life over
and over again, from a Kenny Chesney to a a

(01:33:21):
Wayne Coyn. I have found that it is the not
belonging that keeps me in the balance and in the
presence of people's minds, as the like what the fuck character,
you know, And I love being the what the fuck character?
You know. I'm like Francis mcdormant. I just show up
in all the cool movies and you're like, oh man,
it's her again. Yeah, I love her, but you're like,

(01:33:43):
what the fuck is she? Okay? Now, this is good.
This is good.

Speaker 1 (01:33:46):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:33:48):
I'll be Francis mcdormandt of rock and roll for the
rest of my life if you want.

Speaker 1 (01:33:59):
Okay, So let's say you're in Vermont, you go to
Saint Johnsbury, you go to Londonderry, you're filling up with gas.
You go in the convenience store. Are you recognized?

Speaker 2 (01:34:09):
Not as much as you'd think, But when I am,
it's like a thing. Yeah, I'm recognized more often in
Nashville than in New York City than anywhere else, which
is very interesting. Specifically at airports, yeah, airports Denver, Chicago,
and then on the street in Nashville, in Philadelphia, and

(01:34:34):
an in Florida. Lot of Florida recognition. I don't know how.
I don't know how. It's very interesting.

Speaker 1 (01:34:40):
Well, do you ever think twice, maybe you're into panga
wherever you are, say oh, I just want to go
to the grocery store and pick some shit up. You say,
oh god, I got to fix my hairs. I'm going
to be recognized.

Speaker 2 (01:34:51):
It's it's so weird. It's kind of the opposite because
in California, everybody's famous or thinks they are, and so
everybody wanders around like, yeah, I know, it's me, you know.
But being that Vermont is such a small state, it's
actually a little more stressful for me. I put way
more thought into walking out the door and how I'm

(01:35:13):
presenting in Vermont. And I think it's because I have
this slightly political bent to my presence here. There's always
something to do. There's a fundraiser, or there's you know,
just on Saturday, it was with Bernie Sanders all day
raising awareness for the arts and trying to create culture,
bring back the bread and circus, so that we have

(01:35:33):
something to defend here, something bigger than ourselves. And art
and music is that bigger thing that conscious humans are
capable of creating. And it's getting cut. The budgets are
getting cut. And so I'm sitting here in this situation
of again being the weird person that's kind of flowing
through my life with what I believe is my purpose.

(01:35:58):
Vanity rarely plays to it as much as optics of
like where this might go someday, what my kid might see,
you know, like me breastfeeding the stranger at the In
and Out Burger that we discussed at the beginning of
the interview, Like I'm glad there was no video of that.
But I looked so good that night, Okay I did.

(01:36:19):
I looked fucking hot and my tit's were leaking milk
and it was the kind of milk that gets you drunk.
So anyways, back to what you were asking, the answer
is no, I really don't. I mean I don't get
noticed that much. I'm not that kind of famous, okay
that way.

Speaker 1 (01:36:35):
And then what about being an attractive woman in a
music business that is really male dominated. For every ten
guys who are reasonable and respectful, there's one or two
complete assholes. So what's it? What's it like for you?

Speaker 2 (01:36:53):
That's that's the eternal question for a lot of women
who have observed my process. I don't ask that question
as much as I enjoy the body I got this
time around, because I was definitely a dude in every
other life. This is the first time I've ever had tits,

(01:37:14):
so it's been fun to be on this particular journey.
And I think that the identity politics of is she
a hot girl? You know, the sort of rock and
roll barbie stuff, has finally settled, like that dust has
finally settled. I've discussed it to a point where I'm
also just I've aged out of that being such a

(01:37:35):
hot pressure point for people. And now it's just like
it goes without saying that when you signed with Disney,
your image changed, and now everybody knows that that was
me doing that, because suddenly somebody wanted to play dress
up with me, like for the first time ever in
my life, people were paying attention and helping me to play,

(01:37:56):
you know, to play dress up and explore the visual
stimulation that is a woman in a male dominated business.
I think it served me in a few different ways.
Where it failed me, it was character building because I
don't have victim energy, you know, I don't come into

(01:38:19):
a situation with a huge amount of fear that I'm
going to be dominated. I'm surprisingly shy, but I do
kind of clock the room, read the room first, and
figure out what feels on multiple levels, like the right
approach visually. And so when I'm dressing for a show
and I'm thinking about that, when there's a context for everything.

(01:38:42):
And I love fashion, it's just like I love storytelling.
It's just like I love filmmaking, and it's how I
love painting. There is a different tone to every situation
you find yourself in, and I have definitely leaned on
my legs and my physical appearance because it's a medium,

(01:39:04):
just like the guitar or a tambourine or a ham
and be three organ or fucking bagpipes. Every single texture
and tone that is called for in any one room,
there is a medium for that, and Oftentimes in my
life with the music business, or at an award show
or at a radio convention, people have thrown me those

(01:39:26):
curveballs and those unexpectedly inappropriate Just what the fuck are
you talking about? Questions or just propositions or inappropriate statements.
But no motherfucker has ever tried to touch me, because
I just come at them with I think an energy
that already is a little bit creepier than they are.

(01:39:49):
You know, I mean, that's really what it is. I
an aggressor.

Speaker 1 (01:39:55):
You just mentioned being shy one of the things you
said earlier. This stuff out my brain. Well, you know,
I want to make a record. I have my fantasy
lists I made contact. Are you the type of person
who has no problem, no fear, or you're saying, you know,
let me have somebody else call or I'll wait till
the phone rings. What do you really like?

Speaker 2 (01:40:19):
I like being alone. I like being left alone, and
I like to feel like I'm being given a chance
to make a choice. When I'm not, I feel extremely
cloistered and not suffocated, but angry. I get very bitter
when I feel like choices are being made for me

(01:40:43):
and the outcomes are beyond my knowledge and someone is like,
this will be best for you, you know, which is
again that's why I avoided Eric Valentine for almost ten
whole years, because everybody kept telling me to meet with
Eric Valentine. I think the solitude that I seek is

(01:41:04):
usually because I have a roundabout way of getting to
my gut feelings. There's always the initial gut of like,
hey you, you know, there's two offers have come in.
One is would get you to Red Rocks, So you
could do two nights at Red Rocks. Looks like we're
probably gonna be able to headline this year, but you'd

(01:41:24):
have to have a strong support and it would be
a double bill versus one night at Red Rocks with
just you, gut instinct, just me, smart me, two days totally,
let's do the double bill with a strong support or
whatever you want to call it. Like I know that
that time required is really just my own ritual of

(01:41:46):
coming to terms with reality because the fantasy that I
live inside, like I said, it's this lightning bolt way
of approaching life is and can be extremely chaotic. But
if there's stillness in the midst of that, if I
can find those places to center myself and find the

(01:42:06):
places where I can understand that the thoughts I'm having
are just thoughts. Then I don't need to be defined
by my former impressions of myself and just make a
choice that I think is going to bring as much
of what I really want to share with the world
out into the world in the best way possible. That

(01:42:26):
goes for being a mom and a family member. And
it's why we moved to Vermont. It's all the things
that we've been talking about today, but more than anything,
because we are talking about the music industry. I think
I need more time sometimes by myself than most people,
which is why I rent a car a lot, because

(01:42:47):
I don't like driving in the car with passengers. I've
got enough of them right here.

Speaker 1 (01:42:53):
Okay, let's just leave out practicality, childcare, etc. I call
you up to and say literally today and say come
to dinner. You're going to say yes, so, And then
I say, well, come to dinner tonight. And there's a
party tomorrow night, and there's a picnic for families on Sunday.

(01:43:14):
You Andry go, Wow, that's way too much stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:43:16):
That's too much. Yeah, So the big long plan, and
that's what just happened to us actually yesterday in Vermont,
I got invited last minute to a dinner which was
a really cool fundraiser and brought in all the farms,
family farms, and chefs and foodies from all around Vermont
and brought them together onto this gorgeous tasting menu. And

(01:43:37):
it was sort of a wonderful, elbow rubbing opportunity for
me to go meet a bunch of local farmers and
reintegrate into the world of Vermont in a way that
I think is important for the development that I'm trying
to do. And it involved a huge amount of logistics
after we had already figured out that we did and

(01:44:00):
have childcare, and Eric was like, but I already bought
the tickets, and then I found out it's not kid friendly,
So there was that moment of like, oh shit, but
the tickets were really expensive and I wanted to, you know, go,
So we actually called up a friend and orchestrated the
complicated logistics that you just mentioned. The picnic the next day,

(01:44:20):
the childcare, the overnight. Oh in this somebody else's family
is going to be there, so is there parking for
the extra car? And we did all of it and
it actually worked, but I almost missed a couple of
interviews because of it today, because there's not reception between
Shelburne Farms and our home here in Waitesfield. So I said,

(01:44:41):
as long as I get back for Bob's interview, will
be good. And that was that.

Speaker 1 (01:44:44):
You were my.

Speaker 2 (01:44:45):
Goalpost for the day. But that's the level of chaos
and spontaneity that exists in the Potter family. It's what
I grew up with, and it's it's my truth. It's
just who I am. And Eric's got to deal with it.

Speaker 1 (01:44:56):
Okay, now you talk about you know, life crisis, etc. Yeah,
was turning forty difficult?

Speaker 2 (01:45:05):
No, it was delicious. This was a new high for
me because I think I needed a bumper sticker number
for just I think passing the kidney stone that has
been this last four years of bullshit. You know, I
think we all have had our own versions of it,
but for me, forty just feels like an affirmation, a justification,

(01:45:31):
an emancipation from all former promises to self, you know.

Speaker 1 (01:45:38):
Yeah, Okay, now you mentioned Bernie Sanders, whose unique character.
When I went to college in Vermont, it was red.
Now it's more blue than red. Yeah, Okay, we live
in a very divided country. Is this something you think about?
You say, well, I better not say this or do this,

(01:45:59):
because it might have been some of my audience members.

Speaker 2 (01:46:03):
I do. Actually, the problem is that I have such
a diarrhea mouth, and I'm so poorly educated on what
is blue or or green or red anymore in the
statements that I'm making, because I don't live in the
cadence of linguistic times of now. I'm from elsewhere. So

(01:46:24):
when I'm communicating and I say something that's taken out
of context or that I'm just truly just talking shit
and don't know what I'm saying, I usually try to
stop myself and go I think I'm just talking shit
and I don't really know what I'm talking about. But
and so I rarely go into politics to the point
where like me and Bernie, this is the first time

(01:46:46):
we've done this collaboration, and it's because it's touching on
a point that is extremely important to me. Separate of
supporting any one person and siding with or saddling up
to anybody. I'm friends with many politicians on both sides
of the fence, both in Vermont and everywhere in the States.

(01:47:07):
But I also feel like it's more and more dangerous
to tread in those waters. The cancel culture has gone
in one direction, and the woke culture has also pulled
me into many things that I think, Yeah, the spiral

(01:47:27):
goes both ways, and there's been fear, and there's been vindication,
and there's been sea I'm right, and the justification the
conversation that goes on within myself because I'm a Gemini
battles with all of the same content that we all
are battling with, and nobody wants to get canceled. But
because that would that would be devastating. I genuinely would

(01:47:49):
hate to have let the world down by not being
able to have my music be taken with love and
feel like suddenly, not only did I say one thing
that changes, or did I side with the wrong side
or be on the wrong side of history or whatever.
It would be so sad to lose an opportunity to

(01:48:12):
continue creating in a way that I feel is intrinsically
there for people just showing up and being there. So
I do try to tread really lightly in the way
that many Nashville folks do. I think I was trained
under the feet of many brilliant performers who have sided

(01:48:34):
with the things they're really really passionate about and spoken
out when it's time to and paid the price for it.
And also I've seen that respect and that flow. I've
been around long enough to see where maybe it was
a scary thing to talk about ten years ago, but
now it's a little bit more in the collective consciousness.

(01:48:55):
So when I don't know what I'm talking about, I
think is the place where I need the I need
the bottleneck. I need that like handle or that person
who wears that hat we were talking about before, somebody
else with the hat to come and uh and and
put a lid on me. Because if I don't feel
passionate about it, I'm probably just pontificating and maybe even

(01:49:18):
forming a song in my head something that starts to
feel like I can make sense of it. You know,
Metaphors are a very dangerous tool, and language is powerful,
and it's a it's a process to follow down the
yellow brick road of exactly where we're going with all
this stuff. I'm very uncomfortable with it, to be totally honest.

Speaker 1 (01:49:40):
Jason Alden has a song about a small town saying
essentially what you do in the city wouldn't work in
a small town. He grew up in Macon, Georgia, which
is not a small town. R you grew up in
a small town. What's it really like in a small town.

Speaker 2 (01:49:59):
Well, it really is. I think the most important thing
is accountability. Like everybody knows everybody, and if my kid
spit in the eye of another kid at school, it
would be a big problem, and it would it would
be something that was discussed by everybody, whether they were
involved or not, and whether they're they were in the
room and saw what happened or not. And it's not

(01:50:21):
just a gossip mill. It's about the accountability being the
positive side of it as well, not just the sad, bad,
puritanical judgment that you get from people, but also the
like do they need help? Does this family? Is this
family struggling because usually a kid is acting out in
school because X, Y or Z must be going wrong
and they're trying to convey their their problems in school

(01:50:45):
or whatever it is that's never happened. I really hope
my kid doesn't ever spit in someone's eye. But but
there have been so many moments back home where that
accountability is both a relief and like a very nurturing,
like almost a hug from a mother feeling, but also

(01:51:06):
can be kind of crushing and isolating if you feel
like your belief system or the things that you want
for your family, or the culture that you're hungry for
that doesn't exist in a small town is not only
inappropriate but actually just kind of rude and uppity and crass.

(01:51:27):
And you know. So it's been hard for me talking
about this record in Vermont because I have this duality
of the feeling of coming home being such a beautiful
place and somewhere that I want to foster good things
for and help elevate and escalate into a place of
exactly what I remember about loving it, but also even

(01:51:48):
more but also pining for that society and that culture
and that sunshine and that you know, California dream and
Joni Mitchell happy ending that I that I always thought
I was going to live out. So it's been a
really interesting thing, the small town conversation, and that you
bring it up exactly now, because I, you know, I'm

(01:52:11):
proud to be from a small town. I'm proud to
know all the ins and outs. I kind of like
the gossip by dirt and just the other day Kevin Streeter,
who poured the foundation for our concrete here at the
barn one at thunder Road, and he's like kicking ass
race car driving guide. I'm like, whoa see now, that's

(01:52:32):
like some magical small town stuff that made me proud
to be from my town, Little Kevin Streeter from Waitsfield, Vermont.
I was like, yeah, you know, it's just it's cool
when when you can exist in both worlds and have
seen things from both sides, it does change the way
that you look at things.

Speaker 1 (01:52:49):
That's for sure. I Mean I spend a lot of
time in small towns, which most people who pontificate have not,
and I find, you know, you're branded very early window
and then you're that person, you know. I was watching
this show English show on streaming the other day on
Amazon called Pure and the woman comes from Scotland and

(01:53:13):
she's all uptight about who she is, and the person says,
you're in London now, no one gives a shit. That's
what I love about Lay. Everybody's so into their own trip.
You could be whoever you want to be because they
don't care. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:53:24):
I think that's the part about it that I think
maybe it's the Benjamin Button approach to life, where I'm
getting younger and more inappropriate in my old age. But
there's not as much room for that here as there
is in La But and I don't know the show
pure but thank you for telling me about that, because
I'm looking for a new show to watch right now
for the tour bus. So I'm excited to get it.

Speaker 1 (01:53:46):
Well, well, just I was going to end it, but
just before there. I wouldn't put that at the top
of your list, but it's very interesting. Okay, all right,
what have you watched that was good?

Speaker 2 (01:53:56):
Oh my god? I mean Nine Perfect Strangers was one
that kind of blew my fucking head off last year. Obviously,
I'm a big fan of anything that's based in the seventies.
I don't know if that's obvious to people who don't
know my music or what I'm into, but I really, really,
really love seventies rock, funk, soul, gospel, disco. Just take

(01:54:19):
me there, Just take me the fuck there. So The
Serpent was the show that I really enjoyed. I love
the comedic series. I think you should leave. I think
it's some of the most soulful comedy in the world.
And the performances, they're wonderful, Umbrella Academy, love God, there's

(01:54:41):
so many I've really dived deep. I just finished The
Righteous Gemstones. And of course Danny McBride is someone I
got the lovely chance to bump into many many times,
but most prominently when I was opening for the Rolling Stones.
So I'm pretty sure he thinks I'm a cool guy.
I can't remember exactly what I said to him, but

(01:55:02):
it could have been dorky. It didn't matter. I was
in like a silver flapper dress and I was singing
on stage with mc jagger, so it really didn't matter.

Speaker 1 (01:55:11):
Okay, let's take that off. Let's take big Jagger off
the table. It's a thing after itself. What's your number
two or other than mc jagger, your number one?

Speaker 2 (01:55:20):
Pinch me moment singing I mean singing with Robert Plant,
Patty Griffin, Emmy Lou Harris and Bonnie Rait on stage
at the Love Rocks event. And New York goes right
up there singing with Roger Waters and Mavis Staples and
Lucinda Williams and John Mayer and Jim James at the
levon Helm event. And you know there's I mean, I

(01:55:43):
think that I do believe the strength and numbers pinch
me thing is kind of harder to quantify because there's
so many names and each one will tick a box
for other people, so they have this associative thing. But
the pinch me moment that I think means the most
to me is my music festival. You know, like being

(01:56:04):
up on stage watching other bands and knowing that I
created something that not only has an enduring spirit beyond
just that day, but that these bands that are here
playing wouldn't have come to Vermont or come to the waterfront.
Grandpoint North is the festival I'm talking about the festival

(01:56:25):
that I developed with Matt Burr, my partner in Crime
on the Road and Beyond, and my first husband and
Alex Cruthers from Higher Ground. That whole experience of really
dreaming up and envisioning what it could be and then
watching it come to life was Yeah, the best feeling

(01:56:47):
I've ever had, other than giving birth to my son,
you know, just knowing that I was able to force
something that seemed completely impossible into being and that it
was going to be celebrating its tenth anniversary this year.

Speaker 1 (01:57:03):
Well, well was it coming back?

Speaker 2 (01:57:06):
I hope so, babe, I mean, listen, this is this
is the long journey of the music festival business, which
is I think a whole other that might take a
whole other.

Speaker 1 (01:57:17):
Okay, we'll leave it at that grace. You've been very
open and honest. I want to thank you so much
for taking the time with my audience.

Speaker 2 (01:57:25):
Absolutely, I love the show. I listened to it all
the time. I tried so hard not to geek out
and reference a bunch of episodes because you're asking me
what shows I watch? I'm like, well, what about what
shows I listened to? Thank you for having me on.
I was so delighted to be able to be here
and have this conversation with you.

Speaker 1 (01:57:42):
As I say, you were great, no holds barred. It
was the real you. I really want to thank you
untill next time. This is Bob left set

Speaker 2 (01:58:12):
S